Neil & Sarah Say: Six Sticks, Two Opinions and a Farewell to Nightlife

Meet our latest HollyBaby bloggers, Sarah & Neil, a three months pregnant couple who are ready to blog once a week about the new experiences they — and you! — are facing.

Ah, the wonderful discovery of pregnancy! Between the exhausting effort to actually conceive a baby to the process of peeing on countless numbers of at home pregnancy tests, Brooklyn couple Sarah Main and Neil Eggleton began their journey into parenthood. Could it be more hilarious? We think not. You HAVE to check out these first time parents-to-be! SHE SAID:
Let me preface this by saying that getting pregnant is hard! I was pretty close to flying back to my hometown, hunting down my sixth grade sex education teacher and slapping her across the face for convincing me, most of my adult life, that pregnancy was basically a guarantee as soon as you had sex. (I’m talking to you Mrs. Morris!)

After my husband and I decided we were ready to get pregnant we quickly realized it wasn’t as easy as it looked. After two years, three specialists and some drugs that made me feel like my body was a bikram yoga studio, my husband and I decided to give up. “Chop Chop Lemon drop, time to make a baby” was no longer turning the hubby on. Not to mention how exhausted I was by charting and timing everything (P.S. they have an Ap for that).

So it came as quite a surprise when my monthly reminder of how I WASN’T pregnant didn’t show up. I decided it was probably just a little tardy for the party, (Yes, Kim Zolciak that was a shout out) but I picked up some home pregnancy tests anyway. DAMN THOSE SUCKERS ARE HARD TO READ! I ended up taking six, yes six. All of which concluded that I was either faintly pregnant, or I needed to get glasses because I was seeing slightly blurred barely visible lines that may or may not have been there.

I knew a second opinion was needed, and I thought my hubby would be best suited (I did try and take pictures with my iPhone and send, via text, to my sister in SF, but those lines REALLY aren’t photogenic) I’m still not sure why 6:30am was such a challenge for him.

Well I bet you didn’t start reading this to hear about how I took six pregnancy tests for nothing. I am in fact knocked up and pretty excited about it. I’ll keep you posted about all the fun things along the way.

–Sarah Main

HE SAID:
“Wake up, wake up, do you see a line?! Can you see it?” And so began my not-so-gentle welcome into impending fatherhood. It was before seven o’clock one Tuesday morning seven weeks ago (yes, for the next year, time will be measured in weeks, and precisely at that), and I was getting in the last few winks of a deep sleep before heading to my office.

Suddenly, the gloom of an early March morning is erased by the recessed spotlights of our bedroom shining in my eyes, and a small piece of pink and white plastic is being waved under my nose (you’ll be pleased to learn, as I was, that after peeing on the stick, there is a lid that goes on the business end before you get a reading – just the first gem of many I am learning since the end of my bachelorhood).

In case the next stage of this interrogation was going to be water-boarding or extraordinary rendition, I made the effort to peel open my eyes and focus on the offending object – but not quickly enough. “So what do you see? Do you see a line?” To be honest I couldn’t see a thing, but I didn’t want to burst her bubble so I made another effort to focus on the task at hand, and saw…nothing.

So Sarah ran into the bathroom to unwrap the second of six eventual tests she would take in the ensuing 15 minutes. And I went back to sleep. It’s not that I was trying to be unsympathetic, but this was not our first trip to this rodeo, and this didn’t feel like the remarkable start to what is shaping into a truly remarkable event.

It all changed with the sixth stick; by this time, the lines were a little more positive, and my eyes and brain were a little more with it. It still seemed a little surreal, but I knew life was about to change; I just didn’t know how. And to be honest, I still don’t, but I plan on documenting the changes as we approach the big day.

I’ve been issued a stack of required reading but for some strange reason, it all seems to be aimed at the female side of this relationship, probably because Sarah is the one who made the trip to Barnes & Noble. I’m sure there’s genuinely informative stuff in there, I just feel self-conscious reading “What to expect when you’re knocked up” on the Q-train. So we’ll see how this goes…